I often ask my kids to help around the house. Feed our dog. Put clean dishes in cabinets and drawers. Sweep up crumbs after dinner. We are a Montessori family, so a lot of this stuff falls under Practical Life, and it’s supposed to help with motor skills, executive functioning and caring for our spaces. We are also a Scouting family so, “How do Girl Scouts leave a place?” I ask my troop far too often. “Better than we found it!” Indeed.
But the kvetching. “Moooooommmmmm. I can’t. My legs don’t work.” “None of my friends have to do this stuff.” And my favorite: “I neeeeeeed to be a kiiiiiiid.”
The drama. But that last complaint resonates. Every family handles chores differently. Some parents hold off to “let kids be kids,” with the idea that children will eventually learn how to do laundry and clean dishes and do all the adult things. But is there any value in chores? Are the kids who do them benefiting in any way? I turned to Rebecca Scharf at the University of Virginia Medical School, a pediatrician who investigated this question in a recent study. Our conversation is below, edited lightly, as I stare down stacks and stacks of laundry that certain children might have to participate in folding. Assuming their arms don’t suddenly stop working.
On supporting science journalism
If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
The term “chore” has kind of this negative connotation, at least according to my kids. What qualifies as a chore?
Yeah, I hear that. From my perspective, it is something that a child has responsibility for that’s contributing to the household. It’s those daily tasks that we do that keep up our environment or help us participate in family life.
And you decided to study how children who do chores fare?
Yes. I’m a developmental pediatrician, and lot of the things I’ve researched come out of clinical practice. For this one, I was working with one of my colleagues, Dr. Elizabeth White, and she and I were talking about children’s sense of agency, or competence, especially girls, around science. We were looking at this dataset and came upon these questions. The surveyors asked third graders across the U.S. to rate themselves on a variety of things, like “I am good at math. I am good at science.” The sense was, “I am capable. I can do things.” So part of this dataset asked parents, “Does your child have chores?” And we found that children who were doing chores often, or very often, as the survey asked, were more likely to have a sense of capability or more of a sense of being able to do things in the future than children who were doing chores rarely or never. The chores we looked at were in kindergarten or first grade, and then we’re looking at third-grade outcomes that the children self-reported.
So by the time they were in third grade, they were like, “I’m a badass.”
Exactly. We were looking at prosocial behaviors. We were looking at peer relationships. We were looking at, “Do they feel they’re good at academics?” And you could make the case that children who are good at things are perhaps more likely to be given chores by their parents. However, we did look at this across time and hopefully that takes that into account as well.
Was it surprising that all these kids said, you know, that they were more confident?
These weren’t huge differences, but I think it was interesting that they were happier with their lives and that they felt they were better at academics, even a little bit. But it was also interesting to me that the concept of chores is not just the work you learn how to do but the contribution to the family and the household. It’s important in terms of thinking outside yourself or thinking of the ways you can make a difference in the lives of something else.
There’s also something to the technical aspect of yes, young children can learn to do dishes or help with laundry or sweep the floor and there’s the competence there, the fine motor skills that are developed, the gross motor skills, the language needed and the social negotiation needed, which is all useful for children and developing brains.
What is social negotiation? I’ve never heard that term before.
It’s part of social communication. It’s an important part of how children learn to navigate their environments as they grow up. Kids have to learn negotiation in the sense that, they may not want to take out the trash, so could they do the dishes? Can I finish reading my book before I do my chores? That back and forth.
What comes next? Are you planning to look at other things in the dataset?
I’m not sure what the plans are for this dataset. But kids can do a lot more than we think. Chores are childhood. Work is childhood. It’s similar to the Montessori method, but I think that giving children responsibilities is part of growing up as little humans. The task of a child is to gain these developmental milestones, these skills. I think this can be very satisfying for a child as they gain new competencies.
There are people who grow up, go off to college and who don’t know how to cook or clean, and so some impetus or guidance is very useful. One thing I like to think about is how we can positively motivate children. How can you pair a task with something that is fun? There are ways to make chores feel like an accomplishment. Or is this something we do as a family that can be fun? There are a lot of ways to keep children engaged in a task without it being stern—music, an audiobook—ways we can make this time mutually enjoyable.
I used to have this rule that whatever leaves you raked you could jump in. My kid would rake a small pile of leaves and jump in them; and then I would go and actually rake and bag them up. I didn’t expect her to do a great job. But I was trying to set her up with this idea that work, hard work, came with rewards.
That’s great. It’s important to identify ways that each child can contribute to the family in some way. Everybody has different abilities. And if chores are not your thing, then a community activity or service can yield that same sense of competency. My patients who have a purpose, it’s so important for a child’s sense of self.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
